Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov REVIEW
Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel Pnin depicts a
snapshot the ‘thirty-five years’ of
exile on the part of its ageing protagonist from his homeland, Russia, and his
subsequent inability to ingratiate himself with American society, America being
the place where he decides to settle down. This issue of cultural belonging is
a theme heavily explored by Nabokov throughout the work. Pnin, despite being
ever so many miles away from his birthplace, still has his biological clock
centred on Russia. This is seen in his relating his own personal achievements
to larger events back in Russia, for example his possible promotion is linked
to sharing the year with ‘the hundredth anniversary
of [the] Liberation of [the] Serfs’. Pnin is never really able to dissolve
into and properly join American society, the image of his ‘wearing rubber gloves so as to avoid being stung by the amerikanski electricity in the metal of
the shelving’ is more telling than it suggests at first glance. There is
always some sort of a barrier between him and joining America, in this case the
gloves. Indeed, in this case such a bond is seen as hazardous, as seen in the ‘amerikanski
electricity’. Pnin desperately searches for a way to ‘become American’
and eventually realising that this cannot be achieved via emotional means he
seeks to physically and literally become American. This is done through his
purchasing of false teeth, a ‘firm
mouthful of efficient, alabastrine, humane America’. The eventual message
Nabokov seems to be enforcing thus must be that one will always belong to the
land of their descendants and their childhood.
Therefore,
alongside all his attempts to push into the American orb, Pnin is also very
nostalgic of the magical land of his infancy, remembering, with vivacity
perhaps greater than that of his current surroundings in America, the ‘days of his fervid and receptive youth’.
This sense of a yearning for the past is perhaps the main theme that links Pnin to Lolita, Nabokov’s most famed work. He is however never really able to revel in this
nostalgia, ‘sentiment’ being ‘burdensome’ to him, especially due to
how the magical places and people of his youth had all been destroyed through
the revolution in Russia. This leads on to a poignant passage in which the
narrator speculates over Pnin’s wish to negate his past, in this particular
case referring to one of the man’s childhood sweethearts:
‘one had to forget –
because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender
young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the
background, had been brought in a cattle car to an extermination camp and
killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had
heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past’
The
essential, painful question being is this sort of nostalgia really healthy;
when the actual truth is that much of the cause for this yearning for the past
has been brutally destroyed.
Pnin is
in many ways a humorous work, there being a whole list of intriguing, comedic
characters. One has Victor, Pnin’s intellectual sort-of son, who is ‘a problem child insofar as he [refuses] to
be one’, Pnin’s former wife, a rather terrible individual who refuses to
settle down, moving from husband to husband with ease, and then of course Pnin
himself, an example of the protagonist’s comedic value at its greatest coming
during one of his mechanical, awkward conversations when he states that he ‘will now speak…about sport’. Pnin is a
character with a remarkable sense of punctuality ingrained into him, a distinct
individual (phrases such as ‘Pninian’ and
‘Pninizing’ cropping up throughout the
work) but there is an overwhelmingly tragic sense about him and the whole work
indeed, every laugh Nabokov offers comes in a background of deep sorrow and pity.
He is an individual appreciative of the ‘security
of his study’, so hostile has the outside world been to him, whose life
trajectory is summed up in the first few pages of the novel:
‘began rather impressively…but
ended, somewhat disappointingly’
Exile
has halted the promises of adventure and joy present in his glorious youth and
the novel itself shows no hope of things changing. Predominantly depicting the
rather menial events of his life (getting new teeth, moving house etc.), the
work shows no change in Pnin’s unfortunate position by the end, the last
glimpse we have of the man being him travelling yet again to an unknown
destination as his ‘thirty-five years of
homelessness’ continue.
